of green along the fat. Will I wither
snug along my bones or loosen, peel

away? Since my heart stopped, questions fester
like microscopic eggs. I never knew

that the fire in me could cool and still a walking,
talking engine would conduct the business

of my will. That I was less a working
body than a mind’s routine, a rhythm.

Lesley Wheeler is the author of a chapbook of poems, Scholarship Girl, and she currently holds an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her second scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry, is forthcoming in the spring of 2008. She teaches at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.